Voltage regulators, such as DC to DC converters, are used to provide stable voltage sources for electronic systems. Efficient DC to DC converters are particularly needed for battery management in low power devices, such as laptop notebooks and cellular phones. Switching voltage regulators (or simply “switching regulators”) are known to be an efficient type of DC to DC converter. A switching regulator generates an output voltage by converting an input DC voltage into a high frequency voltage, and filtering the high frequency input voltage to generate the output DC voltage. Specifically, the switching regulator includes a switch for alternately coupling and decoupling an input DC voltage source, such as a battery, to a load, such as an integrated circuit. An output filter, typically including an inductor and a capacitor, is coupled between the input voltage source and the load to filter the output of the switch and thus provide the output DC voltage. A controller, such as a pulse width modulator or a pulse frequency modulator, controls the switch to maintain a substantially constant output DC voltage.
LDMOS transistors are commonly used in switching regulators as a result of their performance in terms of a tradeoff between their specific on-resistance (Rdson) and drain-to-source breakdown voltage (BVd—s). Conventional LDMOS transistors are typically fabricated having optimized device performance characteristics through a complex process, such as a Bipolar-CMOS (BiCMOS) process or a Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process, that includes one or more process steps that are not compatible with sub-micron CMOS processes typically used by foundries specializing in production of large volumes of digital CMOS devices (e.g, 0.5 μm DRAM production technologies), as described in greater detail below. As a result, conventional LDMOS transistors are, therefore, not typically fabricated at such foundries.